That reminds me of a kid from my past college who almost got expelled for accidentally DDoS the college's website.Basically, the college has a website that you have to log into to aceess work and stuff.Because he wanted his name to be at the top of the "recent active users" list, he constantly pressed F5 until he brought the website down.The End

See also: Smurf attack, Ping flood, and Ping of deathA smurf attack is one particular variant of a flooding DoS attack on the public Internet. It relies on misconfigured network devices that allow packets to be sent to all computer hosts on a particular network via the broadcast address of the network, rather than a specific machine. The network then serves as a smurf amplifier. In such an attack, the perpetrators will send large numbers of IP packets with the source address faked to appear to be the address of the victim. The network's bandwidth is quickly used up, preventing legitimate packets from getting through to their destination.[3] To combat Denial of Service attacks on the Internet, services like the Smurf Amplifier Registry have given network service providers the ability to identify misconfigured networks and to take appropriate action such as filtering.Ping flood is based on sending the victim an overwhelming number of ping packets, usually using the "ping" command from unix-like hosts (the -t flag on Windows systems is much less capable of overwhelming a target). It is very simple to launch, the primary requirement being access to greater bandwidth than the victim.Ping of death is based on sending the victim a malformed ping packet, which might lead to a system crash.

A ping is normally 32 bites, it would take a ping larger than 65,535 bites to DDoS, and pings to not add together when they are repeated. Also Command Prompt restricts the size of a ping to 32 bites.

(I realized I know more about this than I thought)

More than likely this wasn't one idiot sitting and refreshing the page. They had a network set up or some kind of program and used it to make several computers ping the server just like when EMC was attacked.

Minecraft.net's session servers are currently being DDoSed. Until the hackers stop/Mojang find a way to kill stop them, then sadly there's nothing EMC staff/you can do to fix it. It affects everyone - it's not just limited to EMC. :/